When officials last raided the Philippines’ biggest prison, their discoveries ranged from deadly to bizarre. Tens of thousands of contraband goods were identified in New Bilibid prison, including lethal weapons, alcohol, drugs and gambling material. A menagerie of horses, game fowls and pythons were also found living in the prison complex.
The inspection was carried out after the murder of the journalist Percival Mabasa, who police alleged had been killed on the orders of the prisons chief Gerald Bantag.
Bantag has denied any wrongdoing, and no case has yet proceeded to court, but the severity of the allegations have, however, put the management of the country’s prisons in the spotlight.
In the Philippines, prisons have long had a reputation for corruption. Last month, four Japanese men were arrested for allegedly orchestrating a string of scams and robberies in their home country from inside a Philippine immigration detention centre. A subsequent inspection of the facility found phones, laptops, routers and cash.
Previous raids in prisons have revealed the various perks available to the wealthy – in one high-profile example in 2014, authorities found luxury villas and jacuzzis, TVs, strip bars, sex toys and drugs were available to some inmates. One crime lord was found to have had a music studio built inside his villa at New Bilibid prison, where he spent time recording love songs, even releasing an album that sold 15,000 copies.
New Bilibid prison, one of the largest jails in the world, is infamously under-resourced and overcrowded. It is home to 29,000 inmates, despite having a capacity of only 6,000, says Raymund Narag, a criminology and criminal justice professor in Southern Illinois University.
“That’s where all the problems of the Philippine corrections emanate,” he says. “In a cell good for, say, 10 people, there will be 100 inmates, and there will be only one prison officer.”
To prevent disorder from breaking out, prison officers and inmates develop their own structures to manage day-to-day life. An inmate hierarchy exists across the prison, with prisoners taking on various roles and positions.
Basic functions – even securing the keys – are delegated to prisoners.
“They are the ones headcounting the inmates, they are the ones maintaining the cleanliness of the cell,” says Narag, who spent more than six years in prison before a court found he had been wrongly accused. He has since become an expert on prison reform.
Inmates are also allowed to receive resources from the outside, such as medicine, food or clothes, and cash of about US$40 a time per visitor, meaning there is also a layer of commerce throughout the jail, says Narag.
“If you are a shoe repairer on the outside, then you could make shoe repairs for jail officers or inmates and their visitors while inside. And you can make money out of that, and you could send it home to support your own family,” he said.
Such a system has some benefits, including reducing the risk of institutionalisation and reoffending, says Narag, but it also blurs the boundaries within the prison. Staff become dependent on inmates for their leadership structures, and even become members of their gangs. With inmates able to make money inside, bribes can easily be exchanged with guards in return for favours, including allowing forbidden items such as phones, or even access to air-conditioned rooms.
“If you are rich outside you will be very rich inside as well,’’ says Narag.
LOOK: More than a dozen horses, fighting fowls, and a python are illegally kept inside the New Bilibid Prison, according to BuCor OIC Gregorio Catapang, Jr. | via @michael_delizo pic.twitter.com/bVKQyie1PR
— ABS-CBN News (@ABSCBNNews) November 16, 2022
For the vast majority of prisoners, however, conditions are miserable. In 2019, a medical official from New Bilibid Prison’s hospital said about 5,200 inmates die annually due to overcrowding, disease and violence.
Rules can be arbitrarily yet strictly enforced. Fides Lim, of Kapatid, a support group for families and friends of political prisoners, says relatives who have taken long journeys to visit their family may be refused entry without explanation, or lawyers denied permission to see clients. Gifts of food – which detainees depend upon – can be refused or mangled during searches. Activists inside are left to “go hungry”, she adds. They can be held for years, some almost a decade, because the justice system is so slow and their trials are ongoing. Such treatment, she added, is “extraordinary cruelty”.
Conditions in lock-up cells, where people are held immediately after arrest, are especially worrying, says Carlos Conde, senior researcher at the Asia division of Human Rights Watch. “This is where a lot of mistreatment, torture happens, sometimes even [against] children by the police.” There are few facilities that meet international standards, he added.
Justice secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla has acknowledged that the prison sector faces many challenges and has promised reforms. They include reducing the bail bonds for the poorest inmates, and raising the bar that prosecutors must meet in order to indict a person before court. Since July 2022, when the Marcos administration took office, more than 4,000 prisoners have been released, including some for good conduct, as part of an effort to ease pressure on the prison system.
Conde says that the measures were a step in the right direction, but added that investment in facilities was needed, as well as legal reform. “We lack judges, we lack courts, the system is just broken,” says Conde.
Narag says the government needs to pursue alternatives to imprisonment, and build smaller, more manageable regional prisons, with inmates organised according to risk rather than gang affiliation, as is now the case – an arrangement that encourages low-level offenders to mingle with more serious criminals.
Ultimately, he adds, reforms must address the dynamics and hierarchies within prisons. In the past, efforts have focused simply on changes of leadership. “The structural root cause of the problem has never [been solved],” he says.
